Page 90 - Lean six sigma demystified

Chapter 2 Lean Demy S tifie D 69

Use experts for getting quick results. The word sensei is used in Japan with
some reverence to refer to a teacher who has mastered the subject. A sensei can
quick-start the process by educating through action.
Six Sigma can help you improve the value-added steps, and Lean can help
you eliminate the non-value-added delays and activities. Both Six Sigma and
Lean are about achieving long life and long-term profitability for your com-
pany. As Toyota’s leaders would say “You can’t get anywhere by jumping willy-
nilly from fad to fad.”

Lean Decision Making

One of the principles of Lean thinking is to eliminate delays, which consume
up to 95% of the total cycle time. Decision making is one such process. I’ve
noticed several cases of decision-making delay involving Lean Six Sigma.
One health care organization contacted me over a year ago about initiating
some improvement projects around insurance claims. They have $150 million
a year in rejected claims and $1 million a month in denied claims. They are actu-
ally talking about getting started next year.
A steel company contacted me about doing some training and consulting
back in March of 2004. They asked for references twice: once in March and
again in August. In September, they had a quality problem that caused them to
melt a $100 million dollar furnace.
If you’re losing $1 million a month and encountering slowed cash flow of
$150 million each year or risking the loss of a $100 million facility, wouldn’t it
seem as though you’d want to jump on those problems? Why does it take a year
to decide to take action?

Urgent Beats Important

When you have problems caused by defects, delay, and deviation, the day-to-
day firefighting and crisis management can eat up all of your time. You forget
to spend time on important things like fire and crisis prevention.
Under Jack Welch, GE created a quick and dirty approach to solving small
problems. It’s called Work Out. Jack had noticed that his management team was
having trouble making timely decisions. In Work Out, teams meet to brain-
storm problems and solutions. Then in a town hall meeting, problems and solu-
tions are presented and leaders have to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to
each proposal right then, no deliberation just decision.